Some stories are so familiar, we lose sense of their strangeness. What was once miraculous becomes mundane, because we know how the story ends up. The story of Lazarus is like this. Lazarus was sick and dying, and Jesus didn’t come in time to heal him. Jesus had healed others. Lazarus’s sisters, Mary and Martha knew this! That’s why they sent for him. They must have been devastated when Jesus didn’t make it. If you’ve heard this story before, you may be thinking of what comes next– the raising of Lazarus, a sign of resurrection. It’s common to look for the silver lining, to want to move through the pain to comfort. We like stories with resolutions for this reason.

But I wonder what would happen if we read this story through Martha’s eyes. What might she be feeling when Lazarus is sick? When she sends for Jesus? When he didn’t come? When he did come– too late? When he challenged her faith? When faith didn’t feel like enough? What might she have been feeling as the approached the tomb, recalling the moment four days prior when she had watched her brother sealed away in the tomb, gone too soon?

The grief was raw and recent. Grief for a lost brother, but also grief for the struggle posed to faith in the light of great loss and tragedy. Who has not felt the difficulty of believing and trusting in God when they are grieving? Martha’s expectations had been shattered. She thought she knew how Jesus would act, as a healer. But how could healing after death be possible?

How many of us today are grieving, missing someone, or feeling the sorrow of life’s changes? Maybe God isn’t acting the way we expected God to act. God hasn’t ended the pandemic or saved the environment or solved racial injustice. There is so much grief in the world, it is not unreasonable for a person to ask “Where is Jesus?”

When Jesus finally showed up, I wonder if he was the last person Martha wanted to see. But when Jesus saw Martha and Mary’s grief and the tears of their community, he could no longer hold back his own tears. Jesus wept. He wept for his beloved Lazarus and for all who had held him most dear. I wonder if, for Martha, there was some healing simply in sharing those tears.

Surely, Martha wasn’t expecting what came next.

What might this mean for us? We could, like Martha, be comforted by God’s tears for humanity in our suffering. We could lean on the hope that whatever God will do next, it won’t fit our expectations, and it may bring new life in places we thought were surely dead. We could trust that just because Jesus hasn’t come to us at the right time that it doesn’t mean he isn’t coming at all.

Prayer: Lord, give us patience, hope, and comfort in these difficult times. We are calling for you, come soon. Amen.

Image: James Tissot, Jesus Wept (Jésus pleura)